One of my colleagues starts off his weekly staff meetings with a Mad Lib. “I love to laugh at work,” he said. “But you need to do it in a way so that people don’t think you’re a goofball and can’t tell the difference between sarcasm and your seriousness.” In fact many people think the… Read more »

When you start to plan a public outreach and education campaign, a sense of humor may not be the first tool you think to reach for. You may instead focus on hard facts, thinking that logic alone will be enough to persuade people. Without some pizzazz and personality, your public outreach campaigns risk being boring and forgettable…. Read more »

Four years ago I posted my first GovLoop blog, shortly after the publication of my book of career memoirs. Of the 49 blogs I’ve posted in total, the first was one of the most popular. GovLoop has grown geometrically since then so I thought I would repost it as number 50 with just a few… Read more »

“It is easy to be solemn, it is so hard to be frivolous.” ― G.K. Chesterton One thing I have observed about people in information technology. We are WAY too serious. This is probably why people don’t like coming to meetings with us. That, and we have almost no fashion sense. We joke less, frown… Read more »

I’ve been quite for a while. Time for some fun stuff. What do the Rolling Stones have to do with the State of the Union address? For me, quite a bit. In my book, Confessions of a Government Man, I told a lot of tall tales about adventures during my lengthy government career. One “confession”… Read more »